Cheap insults can’t cover up Labour’s failings
Thirteen years ago, a black youth worker was asked to write a pamphlet on inner-city crime for a Right-wing think tank. It was a topic he knew something about, having grown up on one of Kensington’s worst estates, where plenty of his peers had done jail time by the time they were 20. He had started a community project to help disaffected youth and wrote a 64-page tract detailing his experiences.
In it, he addressed multiculturalism. The youth he knew felt totally disconnected with any wider community of Britishness, he said. They would have time off school for Muslim or Hindu holidays, but had never learnt about Christmas, even though they shared the UK’S Christian heritage. In theory, because of their Christianity, he wrote, “it’s far easier for black people to integrate”, but without their religion, they were cut off: “Without our community we slip into a crime-riddled cesspool.”
The author compared the different generations. “If you talk to old black people, they will say they have been invited here by the Queen,” he said. Now, though: “We’ve allowed people to come to Britain and bring their culture, their country and any problems they might have, with them.” Instead, he argued, we need to make them feel connected to Britishness.
The author of this pamphlet is called Shaun Bailey. He is now the Tories’ candidate for London mayor. And in today’s political culture wars, his real-world take on disaffection and crime has become fodder for an instant Labour smear campaign. From Jeremy Corbyn down to Momentum, the hard Left was falling over itself to condemn Mr Bailey as an Islamophobe and racist within minutes of his selection. “Do the Tories not have any other strategy apart from trying to divide our communities and attack multiculturalism?” posted Mr Corbyn sententiously.
Well, actually yes. I believe the main idea is to run a campaign based on the abysmal record of Labour’s mayor, Sadiq Khan. That is, his litany of empty promises, London’s growing crime rate and the ceaseless blame-shifting and virtue-signalling that mean, two years in, Mr Khan’s greatest achievement is the flying of a small blimp in Parliament Square depicting Donald Trump as an angry baby.
Instead, though, Labour would rather talk about some roughly worded phrases in a useful and interesting pamphlet Mr Bailey wrote 13 years ago. All of which begs the question: who is it, really, that is seeking to create ethnic tension where there is none? It’s not Mr Bailey.